Page 38 of Beneath the Poet's House

“And you immediately cyberstalked him?” Saoirse pushes her chair back and stands. She never expected one of her new friends to leave her feeling like she does after a conversation with her father: Exposed. Foolish. Attacked. “Why are you acting like he’s some sort of criminal with something to hide?”

Mia levels her gaze at Saoirse. “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t what?”

“Cyberstalk him.”

“You just said—”

Mia cuts her off. “I didn’t google him to find out the things I just told you. I knew them already. From a woman named Josephine Martin. She was a student in Brown’s Literary Arts program last year. Emmit was her professor. The instant Lucretia told me you’d gone to Carr Haus with Emmit, I recalled what Josephine told me about her MFA last year.”

With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Saoirse sits back down.

“Josephine didn’t want any MFA; she wanted an MFA from Brown, and she applied five years in a row until she got in. Her first semester was, in her words, ‘like a dream,’ and she felt like she was making tremendous progress. Then, her second semester began, and she was paired with her new mentor.” Mia pauses and smooths her already-sleek hair.

“Josephine and I don’t know each other well,” Mia continues. “We met at a Halloween party of Roberto’s.”

“I throw a killer Halloween party,” Roberto adds in a stage whisper.

Mia rolls her eyes. “Anyway, Josephine and I talked that night and realized we had similar interests, explored similar themes in our work.We stayed in touch, beta reading for one another occasionally. When I asked her to exchange work with me last year, she said she would look at what I had, but had nothing to send in return because she’d stopped writing.

“I asked her what had happened. She wrote to me about her second semester mentor, Emmit Powell. Except, he wasn’t Emmit Powell, Josephine said, and because she knew that, she wasn’t invited back. A letter she received from the dean said it was due to the lack of growth she’d shown, but Josephine swore that wasn’t the case.”

Saoirse wraps her fingers around the seltzer can and squeezes. “She knew that he wasn’t Emmit Powell. What the hell does that mean?”

Maddeningly, Mia nods, as if acknowledging the bizarreness of the story she is telling. “Josephine had been in Providence for the five years she’d spent applying to Brown. Working in restaurants, honing her writing. But she was from Virginia. She’d gone to high school at a place called Massanutten Academy, a military school in Woodstock. Apparently, Massanutten is one of two private schools in what has the distinction of being the biggest hick town in Virginia.”

“Meee-ahhh.” The singsong voice Roberto uses barely covers his impatience. “What does any of this have to do with Saoirse’s new boy toy?”

Mia gives Saoirse an apologetic look. “Josephine swore to me that the man whose novel won a Pulitzer Prize, the man who was mentoring her at Brown, was Willem Thomas, someone she went to high school with at Massanutten Academy.

“There’d been some drama with him and another girl at the school—something about Emmit, or, Willem, pushing this girl further than she’d wanted to go in the relationship because it inspired him to write more meaningful poetry—but Josephine said it was mainly gossip, had hardly reached the level of scandal. He was a nerdy Goth kid, nothing more, nothing less. At least, she’d always thoughthe was nothing more, until she found herself sitting across from him at Brown.

“She didn’t say anything right away, just continued with their one-on-one sessions. She wondered if she could somehow be mistaken—his hair was fuller and darker, his skin clear and his eyebrows more sculpted than in high school—but eventually she couldn’t deny it. At one of their sessions, she said something along the lines of, ‘Willem, I know it’s you, but don’t worry, I get it. If I had your talent, I wouldn’t want to be associated with our white-trash town either.’

“She said Emmit smiled strangely at her but didn’t confirm or deny what she said. They completed their session, and not long after, Josephine received that letter. In addition to ‘not showing growth,’ the letter claimed one of her professors had cited ‘severe derivativeness and increasing ineptitude as a writer.’”

There’s silence for several seconds.No way any of this is true,Saoirse thinks. Then,Please don’t let it be.She grits her teeth. “So, I’m supposed to stop seeing Emmit because some girl you barely know thinks that Emmit is a hick from Virginia in disguise?”

“No,” Mia says. “That’s not what I’m saying. I would never tell you to stop seeing him. To stop seeing anyone. You’re an adult, and you’ve been through a lot. You deserve to make a new life for yourself. You deserve to be happy. I just wanted you to know what I know. That, maybe, he is not who he says he is. And to be careful.”

“Emmit said things like this happened a lot,” Saoirse says. She knows she’s being irrationally defensive, but every nerve in her body is tingling, electric, utterly on edge; for, if Emmithasbeen hiding something from her, it means she must face two terrible truths: Jonathan—with his mocking, derisive, maddeninglyprudentobservations—has been right all along, and the quiet, half-buried voice of her own, the one that says she should have listened to her dead husband, is intuitive rather than belittling.

“What happens a lot?” Mia asks, looking confused.

“That students tried weird things all the time to get into the program,” Saoirse clarified. “How do you know this Josephine girl was even a student at Brown? How do you know she’s not some crazy ex, or just plain crazy? And speaking of crazy, let’s say she’s right. That Emmit really is Willem Thomas, who graduated from Hicksville, USA. So what if he wants to shed that identity and start fresh? Do you think theNew York TimesorUSA Todaywould pay as much attention to a man whose formative experiences growing up included—or was likely even limited to—tipping cows?”

“But if that were the case, why not just admit to it?” Mia asks. “And swear Josephine to secrecy? Why expel her from the program? Why punish her?”

“It seems less a punishment than a threat,” Roberto says, then shoots Saoirse a regretful look. “Like, ‘Admit you know who I am, and see what happens.’”

Saoirse feels her frustration growing. But is it frustration with Mia or with herself? Has she known Emmit isn’t who he appears to be all along and has been trying to prove otherwise? If so, to whom? Herself? Her dead husband? How ludicrous is that?

The thought makes her even more indignant, and she spits out, “So Emmit is in the business of threatening his students? That sounds like some conspiracy theory bullshit to me.” She glares at Mia, knowing she shouldn’t verbalize the thought forming in her mind, but she feels cornered. “Or like the hypervigilant-bordering-on-paranoid opinion of someone who’s been burned by a shitty partner in the past.”

She feels horrible the minute the words leave her mouth. Mia closes her to-go container and looks up. Rather than anger, there’s sorrow on her face, or maybe worry. “If that’s the case, would it be so bad?”

It’s worse that Mia has met her lash-out with kindness. Lucretia’s eyes are on her as well, but when Saoirse turns to look at her, there’snothing to indicate she’s upset with Saoirse for bringing up Mia’s past.

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